By Paul S. George, PhD.
For many years, “Miami,” a place name used here to describe all of vast, sprawling Miami-Dade County, was dismissed as being too “young” to possess a history since its flagship city and the county seat, the City of Miami, was only incorporated in 1896, thus ranking it among the youngest of the nation’s most important municipalities. Yet, archaeology provides a far different picture of the area’s age. Archaeology has long been a boon to history, especially pre-history, and this discipline has, in the past fifty years, opened our eyes to just how long ago humans have lived here.
Amid a lengthy archaeological excavation in 1985-1986 in deep South Dade, near today’s Deering Estate, a small number of human fossils as well as artifacts of humans were uncovered and determined through radioactive carbon test dating to be in excess of 10,000 years of age. Conditions there were excellent for these non-agricultural people, these indigenous Miamians, who hunted and gathered food in wooded and open areas filled with a wide variety of game, and fished in the warm waters of today’s Biscayne Bay.
Subsequent excavations along both banks of today’s bustling Miami River indicated that indigenous people lived there for at least a few thousand years, and maybe more. These indigenous people were builders who used precision with primitive tools to carve foundations in circular fashion for homes built atop them. There are even indications that platforms may have been built under the settlement, providing it with elevated flooring for an area that may have already been experiencing rising waters. The foundations, the most famous of which is the Miami Circle on the River’s south bank near its mouth, that have been uncovered in recent decades point to examples of astonishing precision in creating perfectly circular carvings in the bedrock.
Seminole man spear fishing in the Miami River, from a dugout canoe. Photo taken in 1920. Matlack Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.
Our first recorded mention of humans in the area of today’s Miami-Dade County came with the journey of discovery of Juan Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer, who may have landed an expedition off of Key Biscayne in 1513, as part of Spain’s attempts in the sixteenth century to take control of La Florida. What we are more certain of was the establishment along the north bank of the Miami River near its mouth of a Spanish Jesuit mission to the native populations in 1567, just two years after Spain had claimed Florida as a colony.
Led by Brother Francisco Villareal, S.J., who was accompanied by Spanish soldiers, the Mission at Tequesta was nestled among its eponymous inhabitants on the north bank of the Miami River near its mouth. The major objective of this and other Jesuit missions was conversion of the native populations to Roman Catholicism. Spain in that era was among the most Catholic of nations when many parts of Europe had broken with Rome and Catholicism leading to the emergence of many Protestant religions in the 16th Century. The Tequestas, so named by Juan Ponce de Leon while on a visit to the southwest coast of Florida, lived in a lush subtropical area with settlements stretching from the Florida Keys to today’s Broward County, with the largest concentration along the Miami River and on the northern portion of today’s Key Biscayne.
Brother Villareal and the Tequestas had a close relationship in the brief time he was at Tequesta. He was followed there by a Jesuit priest who established, in 1568, a second mission. A third and more ambitious mission opened in 1743 near the earlier encampments. Headed by two Jesuit priests, it found fewer Native Americans in the area than indicated by accounts about earlier times. Surely the Spanish entrada in 1513 with Juan Ponce and the many who followed him had changed radically—and for the worse—the lifestyle of the Tequesta. Victims of disease, war and other dislocations, the Tequestas, along with Florida’s other native populations, numbering and several 100,000s around 1513, had virtually vanished 250 years later, leaving a lush landscape bereft of humans.
Portrait of Ponce de Leon, with columns and ship in background
During the course of this time, Spain controlled Florida, but experienced little success in creating a viable colony. (Briefly, from 1763 to 1783, England controlled Florida.). Neither colonizer made an impact on south Florida, although Spain granted a large tract of land in the early 1800s to Pedro Fornells, a Spaniard, as well as parcels of land on both sides of the Miami River to Bahamian families.
In 1821, Florida became an American possession through its purchase for $5 million in Spanish damage claims against the young country. Soon after, Florida became a Territory of the American government, preparatory to entering the United States in 1845 as its twenty-seventh state. Florida grew quickly under its new flag, but that growth, throughout most of the nineteenth century, was confined to the northern portions of the territory. There was one notable exception here, and that was the development of Key West as an important port, military base, and center for the wrecking or salvaging industry involving ships laden with goods that had run up onto the Florida reef and were, at least for a while, disabled.
In 1830, Richard Fitzpatrick, a prominent figure in the politics of Territorial Florida, who was raised on a plantation in South Carolina, purchased the Bahamian-held lands along the Miami and New Rivers. Fitzpatrick established a slave plantation on both banks of the stream, as well as on the New River in today’s Fort Lauderdale. More than sixty enslaved persons cultivated a wide array of crops on Fitzpatrick’s Miami River plantation.
But Fitzpatrick abandoned his plantations soon after the commencement of the Second Seminole War, a conflict prompted by America’s determination to uproot Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi River to new venues west of the stream thereby opening the abandoned lands to American farmers and other settlers. The Seminoles were members of the Creek Nation, found initially in Georgia, but who had migrated to Florida in the early 1700s. Fought between 1835 and 1842, the Second Seminole War was the longest, bloodiest war between American and Seminole warriors in the nation’s history. (An earlier war, the First Seminole War, was waged in northern Florida in 1817. The issues surrounding it differed from those that triggered the Second Seminole War).
The conflict led to the rapid depopulation of Miami and other parts of southeast Florida. A small military force replaced the civilian population near the end of the 1830s, as the United States Army established Fort Dallas on a portion of Fitzpatrick’s abandoned plantation on the north bank of the Miami River. Soldiers from Fort Dallas periodically paddled upriver and into the Everglades in search of elusive Seminoles.
Seminole man, woman and three children. Photo taken in 1885. Matlack Photograph Collection, HistoryMiami Museum archives.
Following the conclusion of the war in 1842, Fitzpatrick’s nephew, William English, acquired the former’s Miami River property and reconstituted the slave plantation, adding new buildings to the complex. Yet little is known about the English plantation. A man of large ambition and vision, English platted the “Village of Miami” on the south bank of the river. English sold several lots in the development before leaving the area in the late 1840s for the California gold rush. There, he not only came up empty-handed in his quest for gold, but, more importantly, he lost his life when his gun accidentally discharged and a fatal bullet entered his body as he was dismounting his horse. As for the Village of Miami, it never materialized. English was fifty years ahead of his time.
During the second year of fighting in the Second Seminole War, Dade County was created. Enormous in size geographically, it stretched from the northern Florida Keys to the St. Lucie Inlet. Yet its population remained miniscule. Dade County could claim one prominent business, located near the headwaters of the North fork of the Miami River and on the eastern edge of the Everglades where the Ferguson brothers, Thomas and George, operated a coontie starch mill, powered by the “rapids,” or the swirling waters of the river in that area. The business employed about twenty-five persons who ground the root of the Cycad plant into a starch for baking and laundry and sold in markets elsewhere.
The Third Seminole War (1855-1858), sometimes referred to as the Billy Bowlegs War, prompted the U.S. Army to reestablish Fort Dallas on the English property. Although it was waged on a far smaller scale than the previous conflict, this final war pitting American forces against the Seminoles further discouraged settlement in Miami.
While the problems between Native Americans and the few settlers in the Miami area receded in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the site of today’s greater Miami remained remote and tiny in population, its settlers spread out in farming communities, many of them recipients of 160 acres of land, compliments of the Homestead Act of 1862, along the shores of beautiful Biscayne Bay. The area produced a wide variety of farm crops, many of which were shipped to market via the waters of the bay.
In 1890, the U.S. Census found less than 900 people living in Dade County. But change was coming, and in a major way. We will examine those critical years of the late nineteenth century in our next blog entry.
Seminole people. Photo taken in 1915.